BlockSim-Net: A Network Based Blockchain Simulator
This work addresses the need for more realistic simulation tools for blockchain researchers and developers to test security protocols, though it is incremental as it builds on prior simulators.
The authors tackled the problem of realistically simulating blockchain networks for testing defenses against selfish mining attacks by developing BlockSim-Net, a network-based simulator that improves upon existing single-CPU simulators like BlockSim to better capture real-world complexities such as propagation delays.
Since its proposal by Eyal and Sirer (CACM '13), selfish mining attack on proof-of-work blockchains has been studied extensively in terms of both improving its impact and defending against it. Before any defense is deployed in a real world blockchain system, it needs to be tested for security and dependability. However, real blockchain systems are too complex to conduct any test on or benchmark the developed protocols. Some simulation environments have been proposed recently, such as BlockSim (Maher et al., '20). However, BlockSim is developed for the simulation of an entire network on a single CPU. Therefore, it is insufficient to capture the essence of a real blockchain network, as it is not distributed and the complications such as propagation delays that occur in reality cannot be simulated realistically enough. In this work, we propose BlockSim-Net, a simple, efficient, high performance, network-based blockchain simulator, to better reflect reality.